Blessed Woman

2021

The Blessed Woman completes this series as its final piece. Inspired by Francois Octave Tassaert’s 1859 piece, The Cursed Woman, this embroidery explores the entanglement of sexuality as we find ourselves, at times, adrift amongst the multiplicity of desire that modern life surrounds us with. It is my most overtly sexual piece thus far. 

If Taessaert documented the lives of those on the margin (poor families, abandoned children, sex workers), since his suicide in 1874, the margin has been shifted, as those within it take ahold of their own subjecthood while continuing to challenge the rules of propriety. If the original subject can be seen to be ‘cursed’ by voyeurism & sexualisation, my piece instead motions toward the inner turmoil of the centre-piece girl as she wrestles with her own sexuality and the desire for things that a single partner is willing but unable to give.

As her pink duvet undulates underneath her like waves, her diverging desires hit her in cascades as she explores the liminal emotional state that is sexuality. 

You know the feeling….